State-of-the-Art Technologies for Large-Scale Computing

Resource providers in academia and commerce have started to offer access to their underutilized resources in an attempt to make better use of spare capacity. To enable this provision of free capacity to third parties, both kinds of provider require technologies to allow remote users restricted access to their local resources. Commonly employed technologies used to address this task are grid computing and cloud computing. This chapter provides an overview of grid computing and the architecture of grid middleware currently in use. After discussing the advantages and drawbacks of grid computing, the concept of virtualization is briefly introduced. Virtualization is a key concept behind cloud computing, which is described in detail in the chapter. The future and emerging synthesis of grid and cloud computing are also discussed. Today, modeling and simulation of large-scale computing systems are considered as a fruitful RD area for algorithms and applications.

cloud computing; grid computing; virtualisation